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Wednesday, February 29, 2012

A police sergeant in Arizona who got into hot water for posting a picture on
his Facebook account
featuring an bullet-marked image of President Obama was demoted and suspended,
according to officials.

Pat Shearer, who took the picture, will be demoted to the
rank of officer and suspended without pay for two weeks. "We expect our
employees to exercise sound judgment and not bring discredit upon our police
department," Police Chief Roy Minter said in a written statement.

The Secret Service began an investigation into the photograph, but told Reuters that it was not pursuing any action against
Shearer. The phot depicted a group of seven teenagers holding firearms and
holding a t-shirt with Shepard Fairley's famous portrait of Obama. The shirt
appeared to be shot through with bullets. The Secret Service investigates all
threats against a president, even ones made in jest.

“I’m
really pleased with the kind of people we’re getting in – college-educated,
professionals, teachers – even a couple congressmen. People would be amazed to
know who I’ve talked with at midnight in isolated areas – it’s almost comical,”
Thornton said to the Durango Herald.

A study by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a
nonprofit civil rights organization based in Montgomery, found that the number
of "radical right groups" in America -- including hate groups, "Patriot" groups
and nativist groups -- increased in 2010 for the second year in a row

Colombia can keep its title this year as the world's number one producer of
cocaine.

According to the International Narcotics Control Board's 2011 report released
today, 62,000 hectares -- 620 million square meters -- of Colombian land was
devoted to the cultivation of the illicit narcotic in 2010. That amount is
equivalent to more than 57,000 soccer fields.

Though the area decreased by 11,000 hectare, or 15 percent, from 2009, Colombia still encompasses the largest portion of South
America's 154,200 hectares of illicit coca bush cultivation. Peru follows
closely behind with 61,200 hectares, and Bolivia houses 31,000 hectares.

With Mitt Romney's victory in the Arizona GOP primary on Tuesday, Jan Brewer
became the first Republican governor to endorse the winning candidate in his or
her own state.

Brewer, who became the governor of the
Grand Canyon State in 2009, announced her support for the former
Massachusetts governor on NBC's "Meet the Press" earlier this week.

"I think he's the man that can carry the day," she said Sunday. "Mitt is by far the person that can go in
and win."
According to a PPP poll conducted earlier in February, Brewer's endorsement
could have been a decisive factor for some voters. About 25 percent of likely
Republican voters polled said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate
who had Brewer's stamp of approval.

A new lawsuit filed by an Alaska man aims to remove President Barack Obama
from the state's ballot, arguing that Obama is not a "natural born citizen"
because he is African-American.
The complaint, filed last week by Juneau resident Gordon Warren
Epperly, reads:

As stated above, for an Individual to be a candidate for the office
of president of the United States, the candidate must meet the qualifications
set forth in the United States Constitution and one of those qualifications is
that the Candidate shall be a "natural born citizen" of the United States. As
Barack Hussein Obama II is of the "mulatto" race, his status of citizenship is
founded upon the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Before
the [purported] ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, the race of "Negro" or
"mulatto" had no standing to be citizens of the United States under the United
States Constitution."

While many have posited that the "birther" movement, whose followers believe
that Obama was born in Kenya and is therefore ineligible for the presidency, has
racist overtones, this is perhaps the most blatant attempt by a member of the
birther fold to remove Obama from office strictly because of his race.

Illegal "Internet pharmacies" are using social media to market drugs to young people, an international report said on
Tuesday.

The International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), which monitors
the implementation of U.N. drug control conventions, said illicit drugs as well
as prescription medicines were being ordered online
from such unscrupulous operations.

"Disturbingly, illegal Internet
pharmacies have started to use social media to publicize their websites, which
can put large audiences at risk of dangerous products," INCB President Hamid
Ghodse said in a statement accompanying its 2011 report.

He told a news
conference in London that the rogue pharmacists used social media such as
YouTube or Facebook to draw people to chatrooms and engage them "in a variety of
ways which, in the first instance, you do not see as that they are marketing the
drug....then of course they are bombarding them with the sort of drugs."

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

The family of a Gaithersburg woman buried this weekend is describing what
they call a “disgusting” scene at her funeral Mass, where the priest denied
Communion to the woman’s lesbian daughter — beside the coffin — and then left
the altar while she was delivering a eulogy.

The Rev. Marcel Guarnizo, a priest at St. John Neumann Catholic Church in
Gaithersburg, put his hand over the cup and the wafers and told Barbara Johnson,
a Mount Rainier artist, that she could not receive Communion “because she was
living with a woman in a state of sin,” Larry Johnson said of the incident
involving his sister.

“She just walked away, clearly stunned,” he recalled.

The scene at the Saturday morning funeral of Loetta Schoenholz Johnson has picked up fast fuel around the blogosphere, and the Catholic Archdiocese of
Washington is commenting only with a brief statement that says the priest’s
actions were against “policy” and that officials would be looking into the
incident as a personnel issue.

Monday, February 27, 2012

Warren Buffett hit back at Chris Christie on Monday, sarcastically saying
that the New Jersey governor's suggestion that the billionaire investor "just
write a check and shut up" was a "touching response."

The Hispanic Federation, the Labor Council for Latin America Advancement
(LCLAA) and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), announced in a
press conference a coalition project called Movimiento Hispano (or
Hispanic Movement, in English). The initiative is to be "a nonpartisan,
culturally competent virtual tool that will guide citizens on how to register to
vote and engage civically online."

Their hopes to register new voters are in part spurred by the "incendiary
rhetoric of the Republicans and conservative groups against legalizing
undocumented immigrants," according to a report by Fox News Latino.

Rick Santorum told a story Monday morning of a recent trip to Tioga, N.D., a
burgeoning oil town that he said reminded him of a very far-off place, for which
he blamed the Obama administration's regulators.

"It's a boom town. They're drilling everywhere. They're being overwhelmed by
the growth there. But you can't find a builder to come in and build homes. You
can't find anybody to invest in Tioga, North Dakota. Why? Because they're afraid
the government's going to shut it down," Santorum said.

Builders, Santorum contended, "don't want to risk it. So they're building
temporary structures that feel like you're in Afghanistan, because investors are
afraid of what government might do."

A group of marijuana activists seeking recreational use legalization for
adults in Colorado expects to hear if they gathered enough signatures for a pot
legalization question to appear on the 2012 ballot, the
Associated Press reports.

In January, the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol turned in more
than 160,000 signatures in favor of the legalization initiative -- nearly double
the 86,000 signatures required to put the question of pot legalization on the
2012 ballot, The Denver Post reported. However, the Colorado Secretary of
State's office determined that the activists fell short by about 2,400
verifiable signatures after conducting a random sample of the signatures that
showed only roughly 50 percent of the signatures handed in were valid. Colorado
state law requires that a random signature sample meet a certain threshold of
validity or it triggers an automatic review.

Mitt Romney came under criticism Monday for recalling a seminal moment from
his childhood in Detroit that actually took place nine months before he was
born.

Mitch Potter of the Toronto Staron Monday questioned a tale that the former Massachusetts
governor recently told to a Tea Party crowd of attending the Golden Jubilee.
Romney told the gathering in Milford, Mich., he was "probably 4 or something" at
the time of the jubilee, which attracted 750,000 people to celebrate the 50th
anniversary of the American automobile. There was just one problem.

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Making the rounds of the Sunday news shows, Rick Santorum reaffirmed his
criticism of President Barack Obama as "a snob" for supporting a platform of universal higher
education.

The former Pennsylvania senator argued that Obama's encouragement of students
to go to college ignored both the reality and ambitions of those who wanted to
pursue more technical careers. In an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press," he
sounded a more conspiratorial note. Two days after calling colleges "indoctrination mills," Santorum suggested
that the president's encouragement of college degrees was a back-door effort at
philosophical base building.

"Barack Obama is a person of the left," he said. "He is someone who believes
in big government. He believes in the values that are, unfortunately, the
dominant values, and political values, and overly politicized values, and
politically correct values that are on most college and university campuses."

The destruction of copies of the Muslim holy book has outraged much of the
international Islamic community, and Obama apologized for what the American government has
described as the inadvertent disposal of Qurans in a fire. Santorum's latest
rhetorical attack on the president follows his recent questioning of Obama's
religion, in which Santorum claimed Obama subscribes to a "phony theology."

During a Sunday appearance on ABC News, Santorum said that Obama should not
have apologized for the holy book destruction because the U.S. military had only
accidentally burned Qurans. Santorum then added that Obama's apology, rather
than the actual burning of Qurans, was hurting both the image of America abroad
and the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan.

"I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state are
absolute," he told 'This Week' host George Stephanopoulos. "The idea that the
church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is
absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country...to say
that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet
that makes me want to throw up."

The GOP candidate was responding to comments he made last October. He had said that he "almost threw up" after
reading JFK's 1960 speech in which he declared his commitment to the separation
of church and state.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

With the Republican presidential nomination still up in the air, the
possibility of a brokered convention is looking
increasingly likely. Under the party’s rules, the delegates won by Mitt
Romney, Rick Santorum, and the others in the primaries and caucuses are
obligated to vote for their assigned candidate only on the first ballot. If no
candidate wins the required number of votes, the delegates can throw their
support to anyone. There’s speculation that party insiders, unhappy with the
current field, might float the candidacy of someone not now in the race, like
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie or Jeb Bush.

Only a month ago, Newt Gingrich was atop the Republican presidential race. Now
he is in a fight for a win even in his home
state of Georgia as his campaign stakes its future on the Super Tuesday
primaries.

Two polls out of three in recent days show Gingrich running a
close race in the state with either Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum, who is making
inroads with the large number of evangelical Republicans in Georgia. But he will
take hope that one of those polls gave him a healthy lead of 13 percentage
points over Santorum and 19 over Romney

A loss in Georgia, the biggest of the 10 states holding contests on Super
Tuesday on March 6, would deal a severe blow to any chance Gingrich has of
winning the Republican nomination.

Mitt Romney's inability to interact with humans has gotten so bad that even
his wife is now joking about it.

"Maybe I should just do all the talking and let him just stand here and watch
me," she told a crowd on Saturday. "I've also decided: No more
debates. If we're going to do another debate, he's going to sit in the audience
and watch me. And that'll be it."

Her comments came at a campaign stop in Troy, Michigan. The Michigan primary
will be a key crossroads for Romney, who is in danger of losing his
frontrunner status after several recent
national polls show him trailing Rick Santorum.

Rick Santorum's political good fortune in the Republican presidential
primaries has come about in large part because of his appeal to evangelicals. A
Roman Catholic, he is a beneficiary of more than two decades of cooperation
between conservative Protestants and Catholics who set aside theological
differences for the common cause of the culture war.

Doctrine – and anti-Catholic bias – once split Protestants and Catholics so
bitterly that many evangelical leaders worked to defeat John F. Kennedy because
of his religion. When Kennedy sought to confront suspicion about his
Catholicism, he made his now-famous faith speech to the Greater Houston
Ministerial Association, a group of evangelical Protestants in Texas. Five
decades later, when some prominent evangelical leaders gathered at a Texas ranch
to discuss backing a 2012 GOP candidate, Santorum was their choice.

Mitt Romney will “do very well” in Wisconsin if he wins the Republican
presidential nomination, Governor Scott Walker said, although President Barack
Obama has the edge heading into the November election.

Walker, a 44-year-old Republican who took office after the 2010
elections that also gave the party a majority in the U.S. House of
Representatives, said “conventional wisdom” in his state is that Romney will
face Obama. The president stands to gain from any improvement in the economy, he
said.

“Any time you have an incumbent, it’s always an uphill battle,”
Walker said on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing
this weekend.

“If they feel like we’re headed toward greater prosperity not
only in Wisconsin, but across the country, then I think the president’s going to
continue,” Walker said.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R), in town for the National Governors Association
conference, will skip a White House dinner Sunday honoring the nation's
governors, telling staff she does not want to participate in a "social"
event.

The dinner, an annual event hosted by President Barack Obama and First Lady
Michelle Obama, is one of the conference's highlights. Brewer's decision comes a
month after she dramatically confronted the president at a Phoenix area
airport over his response to her portrayal of him in her book.

"I'm not," Brewer told The Huffington Post when asked whether she would
attend the dinner.

Friday, February 24, 2012

Stephen Colbert may not support the idea of super PACs, but fellow political
satirist Bill Maher is buying into the system -- literally.

During a performance of his comedy special "CrazyStupidPolitics" Thursday
night, Maher announced a gift
of $1 million to Priorities USA Action, an Obama-supporting super PAC. While he
mocked the group's clunky name, saying it was "named by Borat," his publicist
said that Maher was deadly serious about the donation and believed a second term
for Obama was “worth a million dollars."

GOP Super PACs like Restore Our Future, which supports Mitt Romney, have allowed major donors to pump massive sums into the Republican
presidential primary. President Obama was a long-time critic of the groups, but
the threat of their fundraising power prompted a controversial change of heart earlier this month.

An average of 5 students were arrested each day in New York City schools
during the last three months of 2011, new NYPD data reveals. And of those
students, a staggering 90 percent were black or latino.

In accordance with the School Safety Act passed by City Council--which requires the
NYPD to release the school arrest statistics every three months--the NYPD
released this report showing that from October 1 to December 31 of
2011, 279 students
were arrested and another 532 students were issued summonses, mostly for
disorderly conduct.

Despite comprising only 29 percent of the student population, black students
made up 60 percent of the arrests while latinos, made up 30 percent. 75 percent
of those arrested were male.
Teenage demonstrators gathered outside One Police Plaza Wednesday, CBS reports, chanting "Dignity For All Students” and “More
Books, No Cops.”

One student at the protest said, "You have wonder what is the number going to
be for the whole school year and we need to ask ourselves 'Is this school
safety? Is this the NYPD showing us that they're keeping us safe by arresting us
and giving us court summons for the most minor things?"